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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Scary frickin' bridge, oh mamma. No I did not look down, yes, I did think it would pull an Indiana Jones, break, and slam me into the rocks below, yes, I am wuss. However on the way back I perfected my non-bridge-shaking walk and managed to peek over the edge. Beerk.

Next to the bridge...

Moss moss everywhere...

The paths are leaf covered and wet with clear water constantly running in tiny streams down whatever hill they can find. Air is clean and green-smelling, trees are utterly tall. This was about 4pm, in a bit of a clearing, and otherwise already dark under the canopy...

Even I would not drink a martini here.

I'd love to see this in the sun. It seemed a quintessentially American river. The fork, the white boulders, the aspens, the clear, rapid water.

Crazy Canadian dog...

The pool at the head of this part of the river, and below a cataract that pours into turquoise so deep it is scary. Massive trees crowding round...I kept wondering where Burt Reynolds and his crossbow were.

Monday, October 29, 2007

A ten minute walk from Vince's apartment, along the sea wall, and you are in Stanley Park. The smell of fresh sea weed, salt water, old trees, more moss; the view of tankers anchored in English Bay waiting to unload or load in Canada's busiest port; beaches of rock and pebble and the sandy ones with rows of parallel logs placed for picnics and firework viewing. The quiet lapping of small waves and the drip of clear water from the land side as it filters over the huge rocks where the roots of redwoods are entangled in the granite...

This was also a return to apparently typical Vancouver weather...

Sneaky Frenchie.

A sandwich of the most luscious duck prosciutto - more like smoked duck, unctuous with fat and redolent of woodsmoke - bought from the food market on Granville Island. We sat on a log and ate these and drank chilly red wine from a flask and watched a spaniel with saddle bags strapped to him hunt for a ball in the cold water....

In the realm of the trees, this is most definitely the memory it evoked. Places through movies...

Leaves. So many leaves.

The north side of Stanley Park, overlooking Burrard Inlet. More a planted park than the wild of the interior...

When I first saw this roof, below Vince's apartment, I thought, Hm! Greenroof! How civilized. But actually, it's just a green. Roof. Moss. The rooves are full of moss. Sloped roofs, flat roofs. I walked past a house today that had a lawn. Of moss. Moss grows up the trees and coats the branches. Maybe that is why the air smells so good. Moss filtered.

The first roof garden I saw, two buildings down from Vince's, with Peace-in-the-Home growing happily on the 20th floor...

Vince walking down his sidewalk (yes it's his, he owns it) under cherry trees. This first morning the first thing that struck me, before the green of the moss (about which more later...there's a lot of it), was the way the air smelled. Good. Like green things, and melted snow and leaves, and fresh and clean. Try scratching and sniffing...

These are from a 20th floor penthouse...

Walking downtown from Vince's place, trees, trees trees...

More trees

From the seawall a couple of blocks from the Canadian's apartment.

This lovely poplar made me stop in my tracks, even though we were headed for FOOD on Granville Island..also just off the seawall...

I arrived in Vancouver in the dead of night, ushered in by a friendly customs officer who smiled as I left his aisle and said, Totsiens...! and met by my tall smiling Canadian...

Our drive through the dark city by cab gave me no impression of it, so when I woke in the morning and looked out of Vince's windows, the clarity of the light, interrupted by tall rectangular apartment buildings, and made more three dimensional by drifts of cloud lifting off surrounding mountains, rendered somehow aquamarine by the repeated use of frosted glass, the repetition of moss covered buildings with lower rooves, was quite breathtaking.

There are just so many things to say about the layered beauty of this city that I must start with its city views, at least the ones I've seen. And my first day was one of apparently almost unprecedented sun - so my impression is of a city of white, turquoise and green with licks of maple red.

From a penthouse garden in the West End

From Georgia Street to the North Shore

From another penthouse terrace, north over Stanley Park...

A terrace from a terrace...Kathy Frasien showed me three of her roof gardens, giving me a very privileged view of the city...

Rush hour traffic...2pm on a Friday, just like Cape Town!

From Granville Island to the West End...another roof garden.

More from Granville Island, which we reached by tiny bathtub with motor...

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The corner of my tiny garden with the standard Iceberg waiting to bloom for the last time this year. It's full of buds in this late October...Fall comes late to my terrace anyway, because it is warm and protected, facing the auspicious east. I, however, am traveling west, to Vancouver, and it seems I will take the weather with me, as I sometimes seem to do...wet Vancouver will be dry and sunny and hot New York has turned mistygrey. Vince and I will meet at an aiport again for the second time in our lives, except that this time we will know what we suspected last time...and it's simply the most lovely feeling.

The Iceberg in May...Pow! Six months ago...2007 is ticking on.

The next post will be Vancouverian and I have no idea what it will be! I may dedicate it to Vivian, at Holly, Wood and Vine, who discovered, at the last moment, that the course on greenwalls that I wanted to attend was being held in Vancouver next week, thus extending my stay by a couple of days.

In fact no, the next post will be about lobster salad, Spring Street style, but more about that later...

Monday, October 22, 2007

The Other Day I bought a bottle of Graham Beck Gamekeeper's Reserve 2004. Don't buy it, it sucks. Not off, not corked, just not good. So I popped it in the fridge to take the edge off. Then I put a splash of Cassis in one of my Chicago glasses, followed by a slice of lime (sleighce of leime)...then the red wine. I thought it needed an ice cube so one followed.

Jolly good! A Kir Rouge...

Since the riff-raff (both dearly beloved) have been making Comments about the perceived size of my drinks, a scale is provided. This one is...tall, at any rate. Tonight's drink, and the reason I wax lyrical: a Kir Royale. A very nice (cheap as they go) champagne, new to me: Leclerc Briant, $23 at my Local, and the splash of Cassis. I really love Cassis. I do not believe in fruit drinks. Ugh. I'm old school. Except for that cocktail with cognac and summer fruits and champagne; and the fresh-squeezed watermelon juice and frigid Tequila....and summer peaches pureed with prosecco...hm. Oh well. Cassis is a close friend and on the odd occasions when the world is too much with me, finds its way into good but not spectacular champagne, to make a party.

Now why don't I feel this way about dropping acid**??? It's just not...pretty.

Newspaperman to Canadian fur trapper recently emerged from the woods: Sir, Sir! are you a mousse top or a mousse bottom?

Sorry. It's the bubbles.

**Oh ye of shaken faith: I live vicariously through Bob in all matters drug-related...if it sounds as though I speak from experience, 'tis because I experience Bob's post-event analyses of his partydrug-addled weekends...all related, by him, through a Cheshire cat grin...

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We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

How will we know it's us without our past?

...How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know - and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?